Normally I'm pretty good to back up the data on my computer. However when we moved from Illinois I didn't bring my external hard drive with me (with which I back up most of my stuff) because I thought we'd only be away from our stuff a couple months at most. We weren't planning to build a house. So I backed up just before we moved but haven't since. I didn't want to buy a new external hard drive when I have one in storage. Well, my trusty Mac's hard drive bit the dust hard this week. I spent a painful four hours at the Apple Store trying to recover data yesterday. We didn't get much.
Now my Mac is having the old hard drive swapped out for a new working one and my data is gone, most notably a huge photo library and music collection. The good news is I have a year old back up that I will be able to access in a matter of weeks and I backed up most of my photos to shutter fly. Also most of the photos I have taken in the past year are still on my devices. Music is similarly not so bleak. I have a backup from a year ago and most new songs I have purchased are through my apple account so I should be able to load the onto my computer again once it is repaired. But I have lost videos (except for those I have posted to my blog or Vimeo account) and some photos and documents that I can't get back unless I pay a lot (over $1000) for clean room hard drive data recovery. So, back up your data kids. I wished I had a more recent back up, then this would all be a lot more painless.
So I'm going to remember this lesson and back up more frequently. My laptop was 4 1/2 years old and starting to show signs of age (death throes) so I should have known.
My computer had been getting slower and slower until a few days ago it just froze up. I tried restarting it and it wouldn't boot up. It never booted up again (gentle sobbing). I'm very attached to my beloved MacBook in case you haven't guessed.
I tried booting up in some different diagnostic modes. It appeared the hard drive was bad. My worst fear.
Finally I took it to the Apple Store. I checked out some new MacBooks while waiting for my service appointment with the Genius Bar geniuses. Matthew went with me and was able to find games on every device he encountered. The geniuses determined that my hard drive was indeed bad. They got me into a triage mode where it looked like we would be able to salvage all the data. We could see the data and even navigate the folders. However, after several hours attempting to transfer it unsuccessfully we had to mutually declare failure (more gentle sobbing). The good news is they could replace my hard drive for only $150 (parts and labor) a significant savings over buying a whole new machine. Matthew also played games on a tablet there at the Apple Store for the duration of our long visit, without batting an eye. After we left Apple he asked if we could go in the Microsoft store. :) Uh, no.
Earlier in the year my iPad (which I've also had for quite some time) got a small crack in the screen when a certain 5 year old stood on it. I took it to a local place to repair the screen. They completely broke it during the repair. It was totally inoperable after. I wished I had either just used it with the screen cracked or taken it straight to Apple. I was pretty upset about it and asked the company to pay me something for breaking my device, which they did. But I'm never going there again. I kept the broken device even though they wanted to farm it for parts (without giving me anything for it). I let Matthew take it apart. Inside, behind the touch screen its almost all battery. The ICs are so small. And yet it can do so much. This was soon after Matthew took apart an older computer with a large motherboard. Moore's Law in action.
So, be sure to back up your important stuff. And please forgive all the mistakes in this blog post. Blogging from my iPad or phone is not easy.
2 comments:
With the iPad did you let Matthew go at it with a multimeter and try to identify all of the ICs?
Our laptop decided to update recently and Dana lost many of his newer files and photos. We had to spend some quality time at the Microsoft store in Portland. After that we shopped around for backup services. We even tried one, but it was so slow and slowed down our computer a significant amount. Dana found an external hard drive that we can just leave plugged in and that will update itself on a regular schedule. Yay for not losing your stuff! Sorry about all the data troubles.
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